From the Vault: Torvill and Dean win Valentine's Day gold in Sarajevo

Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean skate their way to a gold medal at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo with their Bolero routine. Photograph: PA

Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have finally admitted to "dabbling" in romance during their long career together. The papers and public have always been curious about their relationship, but the skaters have denied their union was romantic until now. Only two years ago Torvill said: "We decided very early on that if we had slept together we couldn't have skated." Well, they seem to have survived their fleeting fling. Twenty-nine years after they won Olympic gold in Sarajevo on Valentine's Day, eight million people tune in to watch them every Saturday night on primetime TV.

Sport is not a natural breeding ground for romantic tales, despite Gary Neville's best efforts with Paul Scholes and David Beckham. Most sporting glories can be traced back to the solitary determination of individuals or the collective will and skill of teams. It is rare for two people to come along as a duo and forge a successful career together.

Torvill and Dean are different. They are so indelibly linked that their names only sound right when said together. That their most sensual performance won Olympic gold on Valentine's Day adds an extra whiff of romance to the tale.

The pair first danced together in 1975, when Harold Wilson was prime minister, the average house price in the UK was £12,000 and working men earned around £4,000 a year. She worked as an insurance clerk and he was training to be a police officer, so they practised in the mornings, evenings and weekends.

They became British champions in 1978, a title they would retain for the next six years. After coming fifth in their first Winter Olympics in 1980 and then fourth in the World Championships, they decided to devote themselves to skating full-time. Unlike their Eastern European contemporaries, Torvill and Dean had held down regular jobs while competing, but thanks to a grant from Nottingham City Council, they scraped together enough money to dedicate themselves to dancing.

Four years later they glided their way into sporting folklore at the Winter Olympics in the old socialist republic of Yugoslavia. Half the British population watched on TV as they won gold for their slow and gentle imagining of Ravel's Bolero.

The music was too long for the competition's rules, so they held the blades of their skates above the ice for the first 18 seconds of the routine to avoid disqualification. The four minutes and 10 seconds in which they skated won over the judges, who awarded them the highest score in the history of the sport. It sounds unlikely, but a pair of amateur ice-skaters supported by Nottingham City council became one of the greatest sporting duos of our time.

A month after their triumph in Sarajevo, Torvill and Dean moved on to Ottawa for the World Championships. Clive James takes up the story from there with a wonderful piece of extended writing that was published in the Observer in March 1984:

Ice dance beyond words

by Clive James on 18 March 1984

Tomorrow in Ottawa the World Championships commence in which Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean will defend their ice-dance title for the last time, so this might not be the only article on the subject in today's newspapers. But it will be the only article on the subject written by someone whose own talent for ice-dancing is beyond question.

It was at Peterborough last year that I invented the difficult ice-dancing manoeuvre now generally known in the sport as "landing on the money". The rink was crowded and I was attempting to astonish my small daughter with sheer speed. Twenty-five years had gone by since I had last skated, but all the old style was still there – ankles touching the ice, nose level with the knees, arms flailing. Tripping over some young fool's trailing skate, I took off, sailed high, and fell with my body so perfectly arched that my upper thighs were the first part of it to hit the ice. The small change in my trouser pocket was driven through the flesh almost to the bone. The purple bruise could not only be seen for weeks afterwards, it could be read: ELIZABETH D.G. REG 1976.

So what follows is essentially a tribute from a fellow-skater. But by now, however distinguished one's qualifications, there is no hope of attaining piercing new insights into the art of Torvill and Dean. A whole literature already exists. In addition to John Hennessy's excellent book, Torvill and Dean, there are deeply researched magazine articles without number, down to and including Family Circle's indispensable analysis of how Jayne cossets her dry skin, "cleaning with RoC gentle milk and tonic and moisturising with Clinique". All one can do, while quietly cosseting the embossed bruise on one's thigh, is to attempt a synthesis.

A big help in this department is the newly rush-released video called Torvill and Dean: Path to Perfection, which features all the glittering routines in which they have given us so much, plus several prime examples of the interviews in which they have very sensibly given us so little. Jayne's definition of the difference in character between Chris and herself is obviously the longest sentence she can, or at any rate wants to, utter. "He panics and I don't." The video thus reminds us directly of what the book and articles admit only by default: that these two speak a language beyond words.

Ice-dancing, until recent years, was barely respectable. Pairs skating, its snootier elder sister, was not only athletically more taxing but had an apparent monopoly of aesthetic clout. Indeed ice-dancing wasn't even an Olympic sport until 1976, by which time pairs skating was a full decade into the era pioneered by the Protopopovs, the Russian couple whose name sounded like a moped misfiring, but whose skating was so lyrical that you couldn't wait to see them again.

There was no problem about seeing them again because they won everything for years on end, but in fact the epoch they inaugurated had them as its apex. Ten years or so onward, another pair of Russians, Rodnina and Zaitsev, similarly creamed all opposition, but their awe-inspiring athleticism was no more lyrical than two mastiffs fighting on a flat-bed truck moving at 60 mph. Zaitsev was Rodnina's second partner and it was easy to believe rumours that she had eaten the first.

If anyone was going to top the Protopopovs it would have been two young Americans wonderfully called Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, but injury cut short their career. Even had it continued, they would have been obliged to expend much of their energy on acrobatics. That was, and is, in too many senses of the word, the catch. In pairs skating the man lifts the woman up, drops her and catches her. Or he throws her away and she does three turns in the air before landing on one blade. Or three and a quarter turns before landing in the audience. In pairs skating the stunts are there for the doing and time spent on just looking beautiful costs points.

But while waiting in vain for the spirit of the Protopopovs to be reincarnated in the pairs skating, the dedicated voyeur gradually noticed that ice-dancing had outgrown its original jokey status. British couples had always been prominent in this branch of the sport but their approach, to the art-hungry eye, looked strictly "Come Dancing", with lots of hand-posing from both lady and gentleman, the catsuit-clad buttocks of the latter tending to be flagrantly salient.

The Russians, once they put their collectivised minds to it, rapidly took over the rink, principally by fielding some sensational-looking women with long legs joined to short waists. The man's job was to show the woman off. Called something like Bustina Outalova, she was exuberance personified, obviously having been raised in a luxury one-room flat full of bootleg Beatles records.

Jazz and rock, still forbidden fruit for the Russian ballet dancers, were allowed for the ice-dancers, who, like the gymnasts, were judged to inhabit an idea-free realm in which Western influence was tolerable. Besides which, no Russian ice-dance couple ever dreamed of uncorking a hep-cat sequence of steps without following it up by a homage to the Soviet folk-dance tradition involving a lot of heel down, toe up, and arms folded.

Anyone who has sat through an all-Soviet folk-dancing display in the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses knows how a single evening can seem like an entire five-year plan, but when the jollification took place on ice it was redeemed by bounce. Also the heel-kicking fervour of the quick bits favoured languor in the slow bits by way of contrast, with the world champions Moiseyeva and Minenkov looking particularly classy. Among their awed admirers in the late 1970s were the new young British couple from Nottingham, Torvill and Dean – he a policeman, she an insurance clerk, but they, in their double heart, already a single conduit of artistry.

Artistry was what they were after, even in their first endeaveours, although for a while it took a keen eye to spot it. They did well from the start, but with a lot of pace changing razzle-dazzle like the Russians, while their costumes were still in the fine old British tradition of crotch-catcher: cat-suit for him and bumfreezer frilled frock for her. Their new trainer, Betty Callaway, was eventually to make all the difference, because she had the international connections that could secure for them what all artists demand by right – ideal conditions. But at the beginning the Callaway Connection manifested itself mainly in a comprehensive neatening up of what they could do already.

As research now shows, however, the two-person revolution was already under way. In 1981 Torvill and Dean became European and World champions with what looked like a refined version of the conventional fast-slow-fast free dance programme, but with hindsight it wasn't a finished product as much as a whole new heap of raw material. Sandwiched between the usual bravura displays of quick footwork, there was a smouldering rumba to Red Sails in the Sunset. Here could already be seen some of the pay-off for the investment they had put in by taking instruction from Gideon Avrahami, a Ballet Rambert teacher who helped them make their arms and bodies part of the total picture.

The moment the pace dropped, Torvill and Dean looked different from any other couple. It was the same in the days of be-bop: playing flat out, the great names all sounded equally bewildering, but in the slow numbers Charlie Parker emerged as the unmistakable genius. You can dazzle people with technique, but you can't move them. Torvill and Dean's first all-conquering free dance programme was stunning in the fast bits, but in the slow bits it was better than that. The idea of making the whole thing slow, however, was still too daring, or too obvious, to be seriously entertained.

Torvill and Dean's big idea snuck up on them, and on the world, through the OSP – the Original Set Pattern. As the experienced watcher of television ice-dance competitions has long been aware, this necessary preliminary to the free dance not only counts for a high proportion of the total marks, it absorbs a high proportion of the total inventiveness. Torvill and Dean made this more true than ever, to the point where their OSP began regularly transmitting a unified aesthetic charge which their free dance couldn't match until the following year, if at all.

From 1981 onwards, they were competing mainly against themselves, winning everything except the 1983 European Championships, from which they were forced to withdraw after a training accident in which Jayne fell flat on her back from shoulder height, with results even more painful than those engendered by the present writer's famous thigh-dive on to the bunched coins. But they competed with themselves the way artists do, growing impatient with the merely spectacular, pushing the original to extremes, joining the intensities together.

Their first fully-thought-through free dance was the Mack and Mabel routine, using undoctored music from the show of the same name. Here was the embodiment of their new prosperity. The Callaway Connection had by now won them a home-away-from-home in Oberstdorf, southern Bavaria, where they could get six hours' unhindered ice-time a day on three different rinks, one of them with mirrors. The Labour-controlled Nottingham City Council had imaginatively granted them four years' sustenance up to the 1984 Olympics. A few demented voices protested that they should therefore be training in Nottingham instead of Oberstdorf, but nobody sane wanted to see them condemned to the old, punishing, late-night sessions at the local rink. It wouldn't have been enough.

Their gold costumes, on the other hand, were too much. Poised to begin, they looked like two packets of Benson & Hedges cigarettes in a refrigerator. But if the colour was garish, the cut was a distinct improvement on days of old. Erstwhile champion ice-dancer Courtney Jones had taken command of their general appearance. Jayne's hem-lines were lower; contrariwise, her knickers were cut higher at the sides; the combined effect being a greater length of leg more decorously revealed.

Jayne is ten inches shorter than Chris and must stretch to match him on the long edges. She looks good doing so and never looked better than in the slow sections of Mack and Mabel. There was a central, essentially T&D moment when she, after describing a wide circle using him as pivot, pulled him towards her as if her strength was temporarily in the ascendant. The fast sections featured comparably witty moments – there was a celebrated passage where she lay across his back doing little weightless steps sideways – but your attention was not allowed to linger. The emphasis was on breath-taking, not heart-touching.

In their slow blues OSP to Summertime, however, the pace was cut back to the limit the rules allowed. This wasn't dancing on ice — it was ice-dancing, a different thing. The tempo never varied but everything else did, with the movements forming an unbroken sequence which made you grateful that the rules said it must be repeated twice. Torvill and Dean, who admire Astaire and Rogers, with this routine achieved something comparable to the great Fred and Ginger dance duets in the RKO musicals of the the 1930s. Dean, as Astaire was, is the innovator, and Torvill, as Rogers was, is the ideal partner, but a more instructive element of comparison is in the drive towards unity, a linking of highlights. Astaire simplified the photography until the whole routine could be filmed in one shot. Dean controlled the tempo so that there was no break in the emotional tension. Seeing the results, Fleet Street could not believe that Jayne and Chris were not in love.

Only Fleet Street feels cheated at being left out of the secret of whether Torvill and Dean go to bed together. ("On St Valentine's morning," wrote The Times correspondent from Sarajevo, "Dean gave his partner an orchid. we cannot know of what it spoke!") Ordinary mortals, from the Queen to the window-cleaners, are responding to a deeper secret than that. Not many artists in any field can unite a nation. And not even Torvill and Dean can do that for more than a few minutes.

After the World Championships they will presumably turn professional; a move which has so far meant, for the great skaters, the loss of their grip on the public imagination. John Curry and Robin Cousins have mounted imaginative professional ice shows, but you have to go to see them – apart from the occasional television special, they don't come to you. Also, it is hard to believe, despite frequent protestations from the newly wealthy ex-champions, that to be freed from the artificial restrictions of the sport is to be released into the untrammelled possibilities of art. More likely it is the sport's strict rules which provide the obstacles inspiration needs.

Torvill and Dean have level heads and will survive their success. Whether the sport will survive their success is another question. Women's figure skating never fully recovered after the reign of Peggy Fleming, who set a standard of expression which left everyone who came later straining for effect. The same applies to John Curry's impact on the men's figure skating, which Robin Cousins could reproduce but not exceed. As for what the Protopopovs did to the pairs skating, it was all summed up in one moment, when she floated towards him in an arabesque and he, with a flick of the fingers, sent her, her stately pace unchanging, all the way around in a slow wide circle and back to his extended hand. That, without leaving the ice, was as high as pairs skating ever went, although in the years to come every lady competitor learned to balance her pelvic girdle on the gentleman's upstretched finger and pretend to be an aeroplane, usually a MiG 21.

Which was why Torvill and Dean chose ice-dancing instead of pairs – because you didn't have to spend half the routine just gathering speed for a lift or a jump. But even in ice-dancing there might be a limit to expression. It is the fate of all the art-sports that the period in which they are more art than sport is restricted to a few years.

Only the innovator makes art, and the great innovator tends to exhaust the opportunities he creates. As Torvill and Dean rest in Oberstdorf before their final challenge, the rest of us are doomed to follow in their footsteps, of which the most memorable, surely, were those three long paso doble strides down the ice to stop on one skate. At Peterborough next Saturday afternoon I might try that myself, if my thigh is better.

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